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October 31st, 2021 (Permalink)

Halloween at the New Logicians' Club

For once, I arrived on time for the New Logicians' Club's annual Halloween party. Since it was a Halloween party, all the members were designated by lot as either vampires or vampire-hunters. As each member entered the room where the party was held, he or she reached into a bag and pulled out a card which read either "vampire" or "vampire-hunter". The vampires, of course, always lied and the hunters always told the truth. Thankfully, I drew a vampire-hunter card, so I can truthfully tell you what happened.

I was seated at a table with three other members whom I didn't know. "Hello, I'm a vampire-hunter," I introduced myself, "what are you three?"

The member seated to my left, whose name tag read "Boris", replied: "We three are all vampires."

The member to his left, whose name appeared to be "Bela", mumbled something inaudible through a mouthful of food.

"What did he say?" I asked the remaining member, whose name was "Lon".

"He said: 'One and only one of us three is a vampire-hunter'", Lon answered.

Fortunately, I was able to determine from this exchange which of the three members at the table were vampires and which were hunters. Can you?

Extra Credit: What were the last names of the three other members at the table?

Solution

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October 29th, 2021 (Permalink)

Remembering the Sokal Hoax & Another Sign of The Times

The following article discusses the Sokal hoax, which I mentioned in last month's Recommended Readings¹, and the "Sokal Squared" hoaxes of more recent years.

• James B. Meigs, "How Alan Sokal Won the Battle but Lost the 'Science Wars'", Commentary, 11/2021

  It was the greatest emperor's-new-clothes gag in modern intellectual history. Physicist Alan Sokal's famous hoax article―a putative attack on the legitimacy of science and even on the notion of "objectivity" itself―appeared in the trendy academic journal Social Text in the spring of 1996. With its precise mimicry of postmodern language and ideas, Sokal's parody worked like a laser scalpel, mercilessly exposing the movement's incoherence and foolishness. Even the paper's title―"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"―perfectly captured the Olympian pretentiousness of the field. And the journal's editors fell for it. Hard.

  A few weeks after the paper was published, Sokal revealed the truth: He'd come to bury postmodernism, not to praise it. His stunt, now universally known as the "Sokal Hoax," proved that the editors of the most prestigious postmodern journal in America couldn't tell the difference between an actual work of scholarship and a vicious satire intended to make them look silly. Even 25 years later, Sokal's paper remains stunningly funny and audacious; every word is a delight. But reading it today is also disquieting. The academic absurdities that Sokal punctured with surgical precision no longer strike one as particularly outré. If anything, they are now commonplace.

  The idea that science is just one of many equally valid "ways of knowing," that Western rationalism is ideologically corrupt, that "your truth" is largely determined by your gender or the color of your skin…influence the views of ordinary Americans about everything from our own history to the safety of vaccines. …

  Sokal toiled on his manuscript for months. "I had to revise and revise until it reached the desired level of unclarity," he said. Meanwhile, the editors of Social Text were planning a special issue, intended to be a resounding rebuttal to the criticisms lodged by…scientists. Though Sokal wasn't aware of the project at the time, his faux paper fit their "Science Wars" issue like a skeleton key in a padlock. … They wanted to put those quibbling scientists in their place. And here came a real scientist―an expert in quantum mechanics, no less!―telling them the postmodernists had been right all along. It was (literally) too good to be true. …

  In plain English, Sokal's essay says that science as most of us conceive it is a scam. …

  Looking back 25 years later, some might see Sokal's hoax as an exercise in shooting some inconsequential fish in a very small barrel. Did it really matter if some Marxist professors were advancing ridiculous ideas in a few elite universities? Sure, postmodernism, critical studies, and various related schools of thought were challenging core elements of the Enlightenment tradition: the aspiration toward objectivity, the dedication to rationalism, the primacy of the individual. But haven't universities always been places where young people are exposed to a range of ideas? What's the harm in learning about some radical views? Won't most students leave all this behind when they graduate and start making their way in the real world? Thus did many on the mainstream left shrug off the warning that Sokal had delivered.

  A radical mindset was chipping at the pillars of rational inquiry and democratic values. Yet those ideas received surprisingly little in the way of vigorous academic counterargument. …

  After the Sokal Squared stunt was revealed, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker asked, "Is there any idea so outlandish that it won't be published in a Critical/PoMo/Identity/'Theory' journal?" The answer, apparently, is no. It doesn’t seem that any amount of ridicule can slow the left's ideological juggernaut. And, unlike in the days of the Sokal Hoax, the main arena for anti-rationalist thinking is no longer just the elite academy. The anti-Enlightenment ideas cooked up over the decades in trendy journals and in departments of literature and sociology have now escaped the lab. They are self-replicating and circulating freely in our society.

  "There is no objective, neutral reality," Robin DiAngelo writes in her bestselling White Fragility. In fact, she sees that claim as so self-evident that it doesn't even require an explanation or defense. The New York Times' "1619 Project" treats American history not as a set of facts to be weighed, but as a text, one whose true meaning is open to radical reinterpretation in the hands of critical theorists. "Anti-racist" training materials urge us to reject the culture of white supremacy, which includes dangerous ideas such as "the belief that there is such a thing as being 'objective,'" or the notion that "linear thinking" and "logic" are desirable ways to understand the world. And on and on.

  When we look at the collapse of rationality all around us, it seems that while Alan Sokal might have won his battle with postmodern lunacy, he ultimately lost the war. Sokal wrapped up his 1996 hoax essay with a resounding call to action, a campaign that "must start with the younger generation." One hears a faint echo of China's Cultural Revolution in his urgent admonition: "The teaching of science and mathematics must be purged of its authoritarian and elitist characteristics, and the content of these subjects enriched by incorporating the insights of feminist, queer, multiculturalist, and ecological critiques." Sokal meant his essay as a parodic warning. Twenty-five years later, it appears that the Sokal Hoax was actually an instruction manual.

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  The following lengthy article about the continuing decline and fall of The New York Times (NYT) is worth reading as a whole, especially if you're not familiar with many of the signposts along the way: Bari Weiss, Tom Cotton, James Bennet, Donald McNeil, and so on. I've edited out the details, so if you're not familiar with these names, read the whole thing.

• Batya Ungar-Sargon, "Sign of the Times", Spectator World, 10/18/2021

  In 2018, … the Data Science Group at the Times launched a project to understand and predict the emotional impact of the paper's articles. They asked 1,200 readers to rate their emotional responses to articles, with options including boredom, hate, interest, fear, hope, love and happiness. These readers were young and well-educated―the target audience of many advertisers.

  What the group found was perhaps not surprising: emotions drive engagement. 'Across the board, articles that were top in emotional categories, such as love, sadness and fear, performed significantly better than articles that were not,' the team reported. To monetize the insight, the Data Science Group created an artificial intelligence machine-learning algorithm to predict which emotions articles would evoke. The Times now sells this insight to advertisers, who can choose from 18 emotions, seven motivations and 100 topics they want readers to feel or think about when they encounter an ad.

  'By identifying connections between content and emotion, we've successfully driven ad engagement 6X more effectively than…benchmarks,' the Times's Advertising website proudly declares. 'Brands can target ads to specific articles we predict will evoke particular emotions in our readers,' it pitches. 'Brands have the opportunity to target ads to articles we predict will motivate our readers to take a particular action.' As of April 2019, Project Feels had generated 50 ad campaigns, more than 30 million impressions, and strong revenue results.

  No wonder the NYT and other news outlets continue to hype fear of COVID-19; this is how they sell ads. We saw in an earlier Recommended Reading that emotions, especially hate, are also the ingredients in the "secret sauce" behind the NYT's current success in selling subscriptions².

  If you want to know what makes America's educated liberal elites emotional, you only have to open the Times. Judging by the coverage of recent years, two things make them more emotional than anything else: Trump and racism. … [L]iberal news media, increasingly reliant on digital advertising, subscriptions and memberships, have been mainstreaming an obsession with race, to the approval of their affluent readers. And what was once a business model built on a culture war has over the past few years devolved into a full-blown moral panic.

  Any journalist working in the mainstream American press knows this, because the moral panic is enforced on social media in brutal shaming campaigns. They have happened to many journalists, but you don't actually have to weed out every heretic to silence dissent. After a while, people silence themselves. Who would volunteer to be humiliated by thousands of strangers, when they could avoid it by staying quiet? The spectacle alone enforces compliance.

  Once upon a time, telling the truth 'without fear or favor' was the job description of a New York Times journalist. Today, doing the job that way could very well cost a journalist his or her job. The people who are supposed to be in charge of the nation's most august publications now routinely capitulate to the demands of the Twitter mob. … It is now normal for editors at legacy publications to capitulate to outrage not only from their readers, but from their own staff. That's what's so shocking about this censorious development in American journalism. It's not that online activists would try to use their power to enforce their views. It's that older journalists―people who should, who do, know better―now surrender to the pressure. …

  …A moral panic…is a form of mass hysteria that happens when people come to believe that some hostile force threatens their values and safety. But it requires some level of consensus about the evil represented by the hostile force. …[T]he media have always played a key role in moral panics by invention, exaggeration and distortion.

  This bears repeating: there can be no moral panic without the media and the social consensus they create. The power of the press―despite its unpopularity―is still immense. And it has used that power over the past decade, and with exponential intensity over the past few years, to wage a culture war on its own behalf, notably by creating a moral panic around racism.

  There is no "social consensus" in favor of moral panic. For instance, two-thirds of Americans surveyed, including half of blacks, thought that the NYT should publish opinion pieces such as the one by Senator Tom Cotton that caused such a ruckus³. Moreover, a slightly smaller majority of registered voters agreed with Cotton's opinion in that piece, including more than a third of blacks⁴. This is not to say that Cotton was right, but that it's ridiculous to act as if he expressed some sort of extreme view when it was the view of the majority of Americans at the time. Cotton's view is the "social consensus", not the NYT and other news media's moral panic.

  Nor is it surprising that the New York Times played an outsized role in shaping our moral panic. Its business model is deeply bound up with the mores of affluent white liberals. Inevitably, in the spring of 2020, it turned its wrath on its own. By the time the dust settled, five people would no longer work at the Times. …

  The harm is…to the public sphere and the journalists whose job requires they have the humility to submit to the pursuit of fairness and truth. It's public debate that bears the brunt of the damage. We are being denied the chance to hash out a controversy rather than hide from it.

  These values are crucial not just to journalism but to democracy and to freedom. They used to be the values of the New York Times. Not anymore. … As the Twitter mob pursues small infractions as avidly as it does large ones, and as the etiquette keeps shifting, who dares trust their own ability to judge right from wrong?

  It's how you know we're in a moral panic: only the mob has the right to judge you. And too many journalists have ceded them that right. Indeed, a huge number of the mob are journalists―journalists from the most important newspapers in the country and the world…. People who had been hired to think for themselves now mindlessly repeat a dogma like their jobs depended on it.

  Well, they do.

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Notes:

1. The Lab Leak Debate & Ideas Vs. Ideology, 9/30/2021.
2. See the second article discussed in: Shame, Shame, Shame, 11/30/2020.
3. "Monthly Harvard-Harris Poll", Harvard CAPS Harris Poll, 6/2020, pp. 86-88.
4. "National Tracking Poll #2005131", Morning Consult, 5/31-2020-6/1/2020, pp. 195-196.

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Disclaimer: I don't necessarily agree with everything in the articles, above, but I think they're worth reading as a whole. In abridging excerpts, I sometimes change the paragraphing and rearrange their order so as to emphasize points.

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October 22nd, 2021 (Permalink)

What is rationality, and why are people saying terrible things about it?

Quote: "Rationality ought to be the lodestar for everything we think and do. (If you disagree, are your objections rational?) Yet in an era blessed with unprecedented resources for reasoning, the public sphere is infested with fake news, quack cures, conspiracy theories, and 'post-truth' rhetoric. … Many act as if rationality is obsolete―as if the point of argumentation is to discredit one's adversaries rather than collectively reason our way to the most defensible beliefs. In an era in which rationality seems both more threatened and more essential than ever, Rationality is, above all, an affirmation of rationality."¹

Title: Rationality

Subtitle: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

Comment: The subtitle is made up of three distinct questions that are addressed in the book. The first and third questions are philosophical, whereas the second is sociological, or perhaps political. The first question is an obvious one to ask, if not to answer, but the others are more surprising. That the book would ask the second question is a sign of the times, since it assumes that rationality really does seem scarce―I'm not suggesting it doesn't, as it certainly seems so to me―but I'm not sure that it's any scarcer now than it used to be. The third question is also a sign of the times: is it really necessary to explain why rationality matters? Perhaps the fact that some people today don't seem to understand why is part of the reason it seems so scarce.

Author: Steven Pinker

Comment: Pinker is a psychologist―or, to use the modern jargon, a "cognitive scientist"―but he's the author of one of the best books of philosophy I've ever read, namely, The Blank Slate². As I mentioned in the comment on the subtitle questions, the first and third questions are philosophical, so Pinker's previous book makes me eager to read this new one.

Summary: The first chapter, "How rational an animal?", is the only one I've read in full, thanks to an online sample. It deals with two topics: first, arguing that human beings are, indeed, rational animals, and explaining why. However, its second part gives examples of ways we can also be irrational animals, some of which may be familiar to Fallacy Files readers: the Cognitive Reflection Test³, the Wason card test⁴, and the Monty Hall problem⁵. Pinker also gives a version of the "Linda" problem; if you're not familiar with it, try the following one―it's mine, so don't blame Pinker:

Lynnda is a 28-year-old vegan whose preferred pronoun is "s/he". S/he attended Evergreen State College and majored in Intersexional Studies. S/he has four tattoos and lives with three cats. Which of the following is most probable?

1. S/he is a real estate agent.
2. S/he is a barista at a local coffee house.
3. S/he bowls in a local bowling league when not working as a real estate agent.
4. S/he attends protests against police violence when not working as a barista at a local coffee house.
5. S/he voted for Donald Trump in the last election.

Answer to the Problem

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Judging mostly from their titles, subjects of the remaining chapters are: logic, probability theory―Bayes' theorem gets its own chapter, as it well should―rational choice theory, statistical decision theory, game theory, correlation and causation, and the final chapter appears to be the one that addresses the question of why rationality matters. This may sound like pretty heavyweight material, but Pinker is very good at explaining difficult matters in a comprehensible way.

Comment: I don't need any convincing that rationality matters, but I'm skeptical about the value of trying to convince those who are not already convinced. How are you supposed to do that? By appealing to their reason? If they don't trust reason, how can that work? You might as well try to stand up by pulling on your own hair.

However, there may be some who have heard the attacks on rationality, are confused by them, and may benefit from understanding what rationality is, why it is important, and why those attacks are fallacious. You can't reason directly to the conclusion that reason works―that's obviously circular―but you can reason indirectly that the arguments against it are not cogent. Once the confusing nonsense is swept away, natural rationality should do the rest. People are rational animals, and logical fallacies and cognitive illusions only show that we are not perfectly so. Also, the more we learn about the mistakes we make, the better we can learn to avoid those mistakes, becoming more rational in the process.

The Blurbs: The book has a strange endorsement from Jonathan Haidt: "If you've ever considered taking drugs to make yourself smarter, read Rationality instead." How many people is the antecedent true of? Is that a big potential readership? Will reading the book actually make you smarter, or will it make it obvious that it's irrational to take drugs for that purpose?

Date: 2021

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Disclaimer: This is a new book and I haven't read it yet, so can't review or recommend it. However, its topic interests me, and may also interest Fallacy Files readers. The problem is a work of fiction, and any resemblance of Lynnda to persons living or dead is totally coincidental and distinctly unfortunate.

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Notes:

1. "Preface".
2. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002).
3. Versions of two of the three problems that make up the test are given here: I'm with Stupid, 6/21/2012. Here's a link to the article discussed in the entry: Jonah Lehrer, "Why Smart People Are Stupid", The New Yorker, 6/12/2012.
4. I mentioned the Wason test in passing here: Are you intelligent but irrational?, 11/11/2009.
5. I mentioned the Monty Hall problem in passing here: Playing with Your Mind, 9/21/2021.

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October 16th, 2021 (Updated & Corrected) (Permalink)

Fact Checks, Vast Majorities, and Outright Falsehoods

The ratings systems of professional fact-checking groups often come in degrees¹. For instance, PolitiFact's "Truth-O-Meter" has six ratings: True, Mostly True, Half True, Mostly False, False, and Pants on Fire!² Similarly, The Washington Post's Fact Checker uses a system of five symbols: a Geppetto Checkmark for "claims that contain 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth'", and one to four "Pinocchios" for various degrees of falsehood³.

In the previous entry in this series⁴, I criticized some of the professional fact-checking groups for using ratings―such as "Pinocchios" and "Pants on Fire!"―that suggest those so rated were lying. In this entry, I examine a different problem with such systems, namely, that they treat truth and falsity as if they come in degrees.

Fact-checkers may be tempted to use such systems because they fail to logically analyze what they are checking into distinct factual claims before rating them. If, for instance, someone asserts a logical conjunction of two claims, one of which is true and the other false, it may be tempting to rate the claim "half true". For instance, if I claim that it is raining and the sun is shining, but as a matter of fact it is raining and overcast. We know from the truth conditions of conjunctions that the statement as a whole is false when one conjunct is false. So, either the conjunctive statement should be separated into two distinct claims, each to be rated on its own, or it should be rated "false" rather than "half true".

A factual claim of the type that can be checked at all is either true or false, and never both. So-called half-truths are not half true, but wholly true. This doesn't mean that half-truths are not misleading; in fact, they can be more misleading than whole lies. The very fact that they are true, but not the whole truth, may mislead even more effectively than a lie would. A true claim isn't the whole truth because it leaves out important context, and it's a perfectly fine public service for fact-checkers to supply such missing context, but it shouldn't be reflected in the ratings system, except in a rating such as: "True, but missing important context".

Fact checkers may also be tempted to use degrees of truth to rate vague claims. For instance, if Barry is balding we may be tempted to say that the claim that he is bald is "half true"―or is it half false?―but if Barry really is in the twilight zone between bald and not bald, then the claim is neither true nor false. It's the nature of vague words, such as "bald", that their meaning is not sufficiently fixed to answer certain questions, such as: "Is Barry bald?" Later in this entry, we'll see an example of how it can be possible to check claims for truth and falsity even when they contain vague language. However, if a claim is so vague that it's not clear whether it's true or false, it's best to either ignore it, or point out that it's too vague to rate and explain why.

These rating systems are an open invitation to bias in rating factual claims. A fact-checker rating a false claim made by someone whose politics the checker agrees with is likely to downgrade the rating from False to Mostly False, or even Half True, or to give it less than four Pinocchios, let alone "Pants on Fire!". Similarly, a checker rating a true claim made by someone whose politics the checker dislikes is likely to find some excuse to downgrade it to Half True, or even to Mostly False. Let's look at an example of this process.

In the previous entry⁴, I used an example from PolitiFact, though I'm sure that I could have found just as good an example, and possibly an even better one, elsewhere. For this entry, I intentionally avoided PolitiFact so as not to pick on it. Instead, the example I have chosen is from The Washington Post's Fact Checker column⁵.

Earlier this year, the District Attorney of San Francisco, Chesa Boudin, made the following claims during a television interview:

Like the majority of Americans, I grew up with an immediate family member incarcerated. The majority of Americans have an immediate family member who is either currently or formerly incarcerated, so I have that in common with the vast majority of people in this country.⁶

The interviewer did not call into question these rather alarming claims, or even ask where Boudin got them. Of course, it's hard to fact check statistical claims in the middle of an interview^*. Moreover, I haven't seen any sign that the program did any follow-up reporting itself. One public service that fact checkers can provide is to check such claims when the news media fail to do their jobs. It appears that a skeptical viewer's question initiated The Post's fact check.

The claim that the majority of Americans have an immediate family member incarcerated either now or in the past is a surprising one, let alone that the vast majority do. It's in just such moments of surprise that one's skeptical immune system should be engaged. The reason why you are surprised at a claim is that it goes against your own experience or knowledge. Of course, your own experience is limited, and what you think you know may be wrong. Some surprising things turn out to be true, but many turn out to be false, and the purpose of fact checking is to separate the two.

As mentioned above, an often neglected step in fact checking is logically analyzing complex factual claims into their true-or-false components. In this case, Boudin made three distinct factual claims:

1. He himself had an immediate family member incarcerated.
2. The majority of Americans have an immediate family member who is either currently or was formerly incarcerated.
3. The vast majority of Americans have an immediate family member who is either currently or was formerly incarcerated.

I don't think there's any doubt that the first claim is true, so we won't waste any further time on it⁷. Rather, it's the second and third claims that call for checking. Though obviously logically similar, those two claims are distinct. The word "vast" is the only difference between the two sentences, but there is a difference, if not a vast one, between a majority and a vast majority.

The second claim is true if, and only if, greater than half of Americans have an immediate family member who is either currently or was formerly incarcerated. So, if just over 50% of the American population fits the bill, then the claim is true.

The third statement makes a logically stronger claim, that is, if it is true then the second claim will also be true, but not the other way around. In other words, a "vast" majority is a majority, but not every majority is vast. For this reason, Boudin's second claim could be true while his third one was false.

There are two vague words in these claims:

1. "Immediate": What exactly is an "immediate" family member? Presumably, parents, children, and siblings would count. What about grandparents or grandchildren? Do the family members have to live together to be "immediate"?
2. "Vast": The "vast" majority of some class is obviously greater than a simple majority, but how much greater is unclear. Is 55% a "vast" majority? How about 60%? No doubt 95% would be a vast majority, but what about 90%? 85%?

So, both of the claims are vague, but that doesn't automatically rule out rating them as definitely true or false. While vague terms have borderline cases―such as the aforementioned Barry―they also have clear-cut cases, such as Barry's hairy brother, Harry, who has a luxurious head of hair. Though "Barry is bald" is neither true nor false, "Harry is bald" is clearly false. So far, we don't know whether the two claims in question are like "Barry is bald" or "Harry is bald", so we can't stop here.

Now that we've laid the logical foundation for checking these claims, let's proceed to examine The Post's fact check. How can these two claims be checked? Obviously, we need to know what percentage of the American population has had an immediate family member incarcerated. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any official statistics that could answer this question. Instead, the only way to do so is to look at surveys that ask people whether they have had an immediate family member in jail or prison. The Fact Checker mentions two such surveys:

1. The FWD.us Survey: This survey was funded by FWD.us, a political group that started out campaigning for immigration "reform"⁸, but has since added incarceration "reform" to its causes. It also supports the silly "people first language" doublespeak project⁹, but let's not hold that against the survey.

   Here's the exact wording of the question asked by the survey:

   Many people have been held in jail or prison for a night or more at some point in their lives. Please think about your immediate family, including parents; brothers; sisters; children; and your current spouse, current romantic partner, or anyone else you have had a child with. Please include step, foster, and adoptive family members. Confidentially and for statistical purposes only, have any members of your immediate family, NOT including yourself, ever been held in jail or prison for one night or longer?¹⁰

   According to the report: "The data show that 45 percent of Americans have ever had an immediate family member incarcerated.¹¹"

2. The CNN/KFF Survey: This survey was paid for and conducted by Cable News Network and the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit organization primarily focused on national health care¹². In a survey on race, the following question was asked: "Have you or any of your family members or CLOSE friends ever been incarcerated, or not?¹³" 39% of respondents answered "yes".

The Fact Checker claims that these two surveys are incomparable because of the difference in question wording, but that's incorrect. The CNN/KFF question is logically broader than that asked by the FWD.us. CNN/KFF asked about all family members, not restricting it to immediate ones, and included close friends. Since those who have had immediate family members incarcerated are included in those who have had family members or close friends incarcerated, the latter set is larger than the former. Instead, we see the opposite result in the surveys: 39% answered the broader question affirmatively as contrasted with 45% answering the narrower one "yes". This is inconsistent, which means that at least one of these survey results must be wrong.

Now, I don't know which survey is wrong, but it isn't necessary to decide. Despite their incompatible results, the two surveys agree on one thing: less than 50% of Americans have had an immediate family member incarcerated. This means that both of Boudin's claims are false.

Apparently, the Fact Checker asked Boudin himself or a spokesperson for the source of his statistics and was informed that they were based on the FWD.us survey⁵. Then, the checker proceeded to check the claims against the study's findings as though the question were whether Boudin reported the paper's claims correctly, though what the checker was supposed to check was whether those claims were true or false.

Relying on the FWD.us survey, the checker concluded: "The overall rate of Americans who have had an immediate family member behind bars, 45 percent, is remarkably high but not quite a 'majority' and far from a 'vast majority.'⁵" So, both of Boudin's claims were false, according to the very survey that his spokesperson cited.

Despite this finding, the Fact Checker spends the remainder of the column making excuses for Boudin and ends up awarding him a single Pinocchio, which is the lowest "false" rating available. Both of Boudin's claims were false, no matter which survey you consider, and his claim that the "vast majority" of Americans had had immediate family incarcerated was outrageously false. Yet, here's the Fact Checker rating and its explanation:

The Pinocchio Test

Boudin said the "majority" or "vast majority" of Americans currently have or previously had an "immediate family member" behind bars. The study he was citing backs him up to an extent―it found the rate was 45 percent overall, and 63 percent for Black Americans―but it's just shy of a majority of Americans. However, the researchers also asked about extended "family members you feel close with." When including those relatives, 64 percent of Americans, or nearly two-thirds, have had family in jail or prison. It's always a good idea for policymakers to read the underlying research, so errors like this can be avoided. For a light stretching of the facts, Boudin gets One Pinocchio.⁵

This is the sort of excuse-making you would expect to hear from a spokesperson for Boudin, not from an independent, objective fact-checker. Is 45% "just shy" of a vast majority? Did Boudin claim that the "vast majority" of Black Americans had had an immediate or extended family member incarcerated? No.

Here's the Fact Checker's description of what "One Pinocchio" is supposed to mean:

Some shading of the facts. Selective telling of the truth. Some omissions and exaggerations, but no outright falsehoods.³

What is an "outright falsehood" if these claims are not outright false? One meaning of "outright" that may apply here is "completely" or "totally"¹⁴, which brings us back to where we started: degrees of truth and falsity. Apparently, Boudin's claim that the vast majority of Americans have had immediate family in jail or prison was not false enough for the Fact Checker. What would it take to make it outright false: no Americans having immediate family behind bars? That would be absurd.

Both of the controversial claims made by Boudin are outright falsehoods, and one outrageously so, even based on the survey that was supposed to justify them. Using the Fact Checker's own criteria, these claims deserved at least three Pinocchios for "significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.³" Of course, it would be better to drop the Pinocchios and simply label them both "false", tout court.

My criticism here is entirely of the fact check's rating and its explanation, not of the research that went into the body of the article. By presenting the facts, the article allows readers to come to their own conclusions about Boudin's claims, and judge for themselves whether "one Pinocchio" is a reasonable rating. This is a genuine public service that I don't mean to denigrate.

That said, fact checks such as this give fact checkers a reputation for bias. One thing that The Washington Post and other checkers should do to restore their reputations is stop using such rating scales. Instead of Pinocchios and Pants-on-fires, they should either switch to simple true and false or drop the ratings entirely and simply present the facts as Annenberg does, then let the reader be the judge.

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^*Correction (10/18/2021): Originally, I wrote: "Of course, it's hard to fact check statistical claims in the middle of an interview, especially when it's a friendly, 'softball' interview such as this with no significant skepticism expressed about anything Boudin said." I based this claim on the latter part of the interview in which the incarceration claims occurred, but the interviewer did express some skepticism about Boudin's claims about crime in San Francisco early in the interview, so I shouldn't have characterized it as "friendly" or "softball". My apologies to the interviewer and to readers for the mischaracterization.

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Reader Response (10/18/2021): David Hawkins raises an important issue:

In this post you criticize the fact checkers for treating truth and falsity by degrees. "In this entry, I examine a different problem with such systems, namely, that they treat truth and falsity as if they come in degrees." However, further down in the post the grievance seems to be repeated. Both of the controversial claims made by Boudin are outright falsehoods, and one outrageously so. The implication here seems to be that the outrageously false claim is even more false than the outright false claim.

I also recall from the "Fact-Checkers ≠ Lie-Detectors" post that the subjectivity issues taken with the term "ridiculous" that could be applied here to the term outrageous. What is the evidence that the second claim itself was outrageously false? Is 1 + 1 = 11 a ridiculous or outrageous falsehood relative to the outright falsehood of 1 + 1 = 3. To your point, both of these answers on a math quiz would be marked incorrect, and qualifying the truth or falsehood of a statement in any way seems to be judging them by degrees, this includes the various fact-checking ratings systems, ridiculous, outrageous, and reasonable.

I certainly didn't intend that interpretation of the word "outrageously". The meaning of the word I had in mind was "in a shocking way¹⁵". I don't think that an outrageously false claim is somehow more false than a more plausible one, just that it's more obviously false. The same is true of "ridiculous". You're right that such judgments are subjective, and what's obvious to me may not be obvious to you, or to the producers and reporters of the television show where Boudin made the false claims.

It's a bad idea to build such subjective judgments into the ratings system, if that's what the fact checkers are doing. One of the criticisms made of them is that they are just pundits masquerading as objective reporters¹⁶, and to the extent that they are building such subjective judgments as "ridiculous" and "outright" into their ratings, the criticism is correct.

I'm also a little shocked that Boudin's claims went without challenge, that no follow-up was done, and that the show broadcast such falsehoods and never corrected them. This is one reason we have a pandemic of misinformation today. There's been so much of this in recent years that I should no longer be shocked and outraged by it, but I still am.

I mentioned in the entry, above, the need of fact checkers and reporters for a "skeptical immune system" that will raise the alarm when confronted with a claim that is "outrageous" or "ridiculous". Of course, any warning system will have false positives, but a well-calibrated skeptical immune system will prevent most misinformation from entering your brain and taking up permanent residence. Given the epidemic of misinformation, and the failures of those who are supposed to prevent it but instead spread it themselves, we all need such a system.

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Notes:

1. A happy exception is the Annenberg fact-checking project, which is one reason why I consider it the best fact checker; see: "Our Process", Fact Check, 8/12/2020.
2. Angie Drobnic Holan, "How we determine Truth-O-Meter ratings", PolitiFact, 10/27/2020.
3. "About the Fact Checker column", Glenn Kessler, accessed: 10/16/2021.
4. This is the second entry in the fact-checking series on what is wrong with professional fact-checking as it is now practiced. For the previous entry, see: Fact-Checkers ≠ Lie-Detectors, 8/27/2021.
5. Salvador Rizzo, "San Francisco DA claims 'vast majority' of Americans have had family behind bars", The Washington Post, 7/30/2021.
6. For video of the interview, see: "San Francisco's Polarizing District Attorney: 'I Refuse to be Distracted'", Amanpour & Co., 7/28/2021. The quote comes at about 15:00. The transcription and punctuation are taken from the Fact Check; see the previous note.
7. See the short biography included in the The Post's fact check; note 5, above.
8. Rachael Bale, "What is Mark Zuckerberg's Fwd.us?", KQED, 4/11/2013.
9. See: "Why People First?", FWD.us, accessed: 10/7/2021. Also, see: Close Encounters with Doublespeak of the Third Kind, 9/8/2019.
10. Peter K. Enns, et al., "What Percentage of Americans Have Ever Had a Family Member Incarcerated?: Evidence from the Family History of Incarceration Survey (FamHIS)", Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 3/4/2019, under "Measuring Family Incarceration". Paragraphing suppressed; all-capitals in the original.
11. Ibid., under "Abstract".
12. "CNN/Kaiser Family Foundation Survey of Americans on Race", Kaiser Family Foundation, 11/2015.
13. Ibid., p. 33, question D12; all-capitals in the original.
14. "Outright", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 10/16/2021.
15. "Outrageously", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 10/18/2021.
16. For an example, see: Mau-Mauing the Fact Checkers, 10/27/2008. I've changed my opinion since I wrote this.

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October 12th, 2021 (Updated) (Permalink)

True Lies

It's not just the news media that exaggerate the numbers of cases and of children hospitalized due to COVID-19¹. I suppose that it won't come as too much of a shock that politicians do it, too.

Case in point: Democrat Terry McAuliffe is running for Governor of Virginia. Strike one: In a debate on the 28th of last month, he claimed: "We had 8,000 cases yesterday in Virginia.²" Strike two: In a television interview the day after the debate, he said: "You know, we had 8,000 cases yesterday.³" Strike three: During a candidate roundtable on a local television station last Thursday, McAuliffe said: "Just this week, 8,000 cases on Monday in Virginia.⁴" He's out!

Obviously, this is memorized boilerplate from McAuliffe's stump speech. Even without doing any research, you can tell that there must be something wrong, since he attributes the same number of cases to three different days. The debate was held on the 28th of last month and the interview was the day after, so "yesterday" was the 27th and 28th, respectively. The roundtable was held last Thursday, so the Monday in question was the fourth of this month. How likely is it that there were 8,000 cases in Virginia on each of those days?

How many cases were there in Virginia on those three days? It's not hard to find out: the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) has an accessible website that's easy to use⁵. You can find out the answer in just a few minutes―I know, that's what I did―and I suggest checking them out for yourself. Here they are for the record:

Date	Confirmed Cases	Probable Cases	Total
9/27/2021	1,914	1,150	3,064
9/28/2021	1,892	1,022	2,914
10/4/2021	1,628	970	2,598

So, even including the merely probable cases, McAuliffe's number was between 2.5 and 3 times too many. These numbers may go up somewhat over the next week or two as backlogs come in, but they're unlikely to end up anywhere near 8,000.

In a meeting with a group of doctors in Charlottesville, McAuliffe was quoted as saying: "Today in Virginia, we have 1,542 children in emergency rooms, ICU beds.⁶" The next day, in the same roundtable interview quoted above, he said: "We in Virginia today, 1,142 children are in ICU [Intensive Care Unit] beds.⁴"

I haven't been able to find statistics specifically on child hospitalizations, but on the day of the meeting with the doctors there were a total of 468 ICU patients of all ages. Similarly, there were 460 occupied ICU beds a day later on the date of the candidate forum⁷. Given the typical age rates for serious cases of COVID-19, a tiny fraction of those totals will be for pediatric patients.

Why does McAuliffe keep repeating these wildly false numbers? He's campaigning on a platform of mandating vaccines and masks for students, teachers, and state workers among others⁸. So, it's obviously in his political interest to convince people that the disease is dangerous enough to justify such measures. Of course, one effective way of alarming people is to claim that their children are in danger.

Unfortunately, the people of Virginia cannot look to their state news media for a debunking of these falsehoods. As far as I've been able to find out, no news outlet in Virginia has done so. Of course, it would be difficult for reporters to check such claims in a live forum, such as a debate, an interview, or a roundtable, but the television stations that broadcast them have done no follow-up that I can find, nor have newspapers based in the state.

I'm hesitant to call anyone a liar⁹, but it's hard to see how this could be anything but lying. Surely McAuliffe must have realized that even if there had once been 8,000 cases "yesterday", it wouldn't still be true the next day or the next week. Why did he keep robotically repeating the same inflated number? Either he knew it was false, or he simply didn't care whether it was true or false as long as it helped to get him elected. I'm not sure which is worse.

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Update (10/27/2021): The Washington Post's Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler, has now checked McAuliffe's claims and awarded him four Pinocchios¹⁰. I'm on record against the Pinocchio system⁹, but if anybody deserves four of them, a rating reserved for "whoppers"¹¹, it's McAuliffe.

Kessler includes three additional examples of McAuliffe's "whoppers" that occurred after the above entry, two of them repeating the whopper that 1,142 children were in Virginia hospitals with COVID-19. Kessler writes:

In speaking about the threat of the coronavirus to the state, McAuliffe frequently touts numbers―often wrong numbers about the impact on children. When we first queried the McAuliffe campaign about his figures, we were told it was a slip of the tongue. Okay, we understand that, and so we passed on a fact check. But then his tongue kept slipping. … And what about McAuliffe’s Oct. 7 comment that 1,142 children were in ICU beds? … The McAuliffe campaign said that he simply misspoke. Okay, we moved on.¹⁰

Kessler doesn't indicate exactly when the query took place, but it must have been shortly after the 7th of this month. So, the McAuliffe campaign has been on notice that these numbers are incorrect at least since then, and yet McAuliffe used them again as recently as four days ago. This settles the question of whether these were simply slips of the tongue or lies. I oppose the reckless way in which the accusation of lying is thrown around in politics, but I also oppose mealy-mouthed, euphemistic language used to conceal the truth. These were not slips of the tongue.

Kessler also managed to track down the figures for how many children in Virginia were in the hospital with COVID-19¹²: 64 for the most recent two-week period from the 2nd until the 16th of this month, during which McAuliffe claimed that 1,142 children were in ICU beds. So, McAuliffe exaggerated the number in the hospital by nearly eighteen times. I still haven't seen figures for children in the ICU, but it must be a small fraction of the total hospitalized.

By now, McAuliffe should know that what he's been saying is false, even if his handlers have been feeding him these lies and he was just thoughtlessly repeating them. Ultimately, he is responsible for the people he hires to run his campaign, and thus responsible for the lies they give him to tell. At the very least, he should punish whoever put these lies in his mouth, and apologize to the people of Virginia whom he has deceived.

Terry, your pants are on fire.

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Notes:

1. I allude to: A Sign of The Times, 10/8/2021.
2. "Virginia Gubernatorial Debate", C-SPAN, 9/28/2021. The quote is at about 8:00. My transcription and punctuation.
3. Matt Pusatory, "Virginia gubernatorial candidates talk to Get Up DC following second debate", WUSA9, 9/29/2021. See the second video at about 1:30. My transcription and punctuation.
4. "2021 Race for Governor: Virginia Roundtable Discussion", WAVY, 10/7/2021. The quote is at about 23:00. My transcription and punctuation.
5. "Cases", Virginia Department of Health, accessed: 10/12/2021.
6. Elizabeth Holmes, "McAuliffe meets with Charlottesville-area doctors", NBC29, 10/6/2021.
7. "VHHA Hospitalizations", Virginia Department of Health, accessed: 10/12/2021.
8. Eric Bradner, "Virginia governor's debate: McAuliffe and Youngkin battle over Covid-19 vaccine mandates", Cable News Network, 9/29/2021.
9. See, for instance: Fact-Checkers ≠ Lie-Detectors, 8/27/2021.
10. Glenn Kessler, "Terry McAuliffe keeps inflating coronavirus numbers", The Washington Post, 10/26/2021.
11. Glenn Kessler, "About the Fact Checker column", Glenn Kessler, accessed: 10/27/2021.
12. "Cases Among Children", Virginia Department of Health, accessed: 10/27/2021. I was looking at the separate page for hospitalizations―see note 7, above―which did not break out the numbers by age.

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October 8th, 2021 (Permalink)

A Sign of The Times

I've previously asked the question: why do mistakes in the news media about COVID-19 always seem to go one way¹? Why do they always exaggerate, sometimes enormously, the risks and ill effects of the disease? Is it just me? Do I only hear about the mistakes that exaggerate? Are there just as many or more that downplay the disease that I don't hear about?

I don't think it's just me, though I can't prove it. I think the explanation for this effect is bad news bias; in other words, there is little incentive for news outlets to avoid errors that exaggerate the scariness of the disease. Alarming news gets people's attention, and the news media are in the attention-getting business.

All of which is by way of introduction to the latest horrid example of misreporting. On Wednesday, in an article about the trade-offs in vaccinating children against COVID-19, the Gray Lady herself told us: "Nearly 900,000 children have been hospitalized with Covid-19 since the pandemic began….²" Thankfully, that's not true, and the article has since been revised to read: "More than 63,000 children were hospitalized with Covid-19 from August 2020 to October 2021….³" So, according to the corrected article, the original exaggerated the number of hospitalized children by fourteen times.

How did this error occur? Unfortunately, the correction issued by the Gray Lady provides no explanation of where the extra 837,000 hospitalized children came from⁴.

What would have happened if this mistake had gone the other way, that is, if the statistic had underestimated the number of hospitalized children by a factor of fourteen? That would mean that the Gray Lady would have reported that only 4,500 children had been hospitalized since the epidemic began. Do you think that such a mistake would have gotten past the reporter and editor of the story? I don't.

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Notes:

1. Here We Go Again: Florida's New Record Number of Cases (Updated), 8/12/2021. See the first Update.
2. Apoorva Mandavilli, "A New Vaccine Strategy for Children: Just One Dose, for Now", The New York Times, 10/6/2021. This is an archived copy of the uncorrected article.
3. Apoorva Mandavilli, "A New Vaccine Strategy for Children: Just One Dose, for Now", The New York Times, 10/6/2021. This is the corrected article.
4. "Corrections: Oct. 8, 2021", The New York Times, 10/8/2021. See under "National".

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October 3rd, 2021 (Permalink)

The Case of the Disappearing Bat

The following headline introduces a mysterious and tragic tale:

Texas man chased down carjacker who allegedly dragged women to her death with baseball bat¹

Before looking at the story beneath it, let's see if we can figure out what happened from the headline alone. There are two grammatical problems with the headline, both of which introduce mysteries into the tale. First of all, the singular pronoun "her" appears to refer back to the plural noun "women". So, the first mystery is: was it one woman or more than one?

Since it seems unlikely that even one woman would be dragged to her death, let alone more than one, I'm going to guess that it was just one and that "women" is simply a typographical error. So, as a first step, let's correct the headline:

Texas man chased down carjacker who allegedly dragged woman to her death with baseball bat

The second problem is also grammatical: what noun does the adjectival phrase "with baseball bat" modify? In other words, who had the baseball bat? The Texas man, the carjacker, or the woman? So, there's a triple ambiguity in the headline, or an amtriguity². Even more specifically, it's a triple amphiboly, that is, it is triply grammatically ambiguous.

The phrase "with baseball bat" is closest to "woman", but it seems unlikely that a woman with a baseball bat would be dragged to her death. Wouldn't she drop the bat? Maybe it's the carjacker who had the bat, but how do you drag someone to death with a bat? A rope or chain would seem to be the sort of implement to use, though I have to admit to a lack of experience. So, by a process of elimination, it must be the Texas man who had the bat. It's rather more obvious how a Texas man―or one from any other state for that matter―could chase down a carjacker while carrying a bat. Personally, if I were going to chase a carjacker, I would like to have some sort of weapon, though again I speak from a dearth of experience. So, assuming that it was the Texas man carrying the bat, let's revise the headline:

Texas man with baseball bat chased down carjacker who allegedly dragged woman to her death

This revised headline tells a horrifying but less mysterious tale. So, now let's read the article beneath the headline and see if this hypothesis as to what happened is correct.

Surprisingly, there's no mention of a baseball bat in the story! Here are the relevant parts of the short article:

A Texas man helped to stop a suspected killer during a carjacker [sic] after surviving a similar incident months ago. … Months later, he was in the same area of Uvalde on Wednesday at 2:30 p.m. when he saw a man trying to force a woman, Jessica Garza, from her car, ABC 13 reported. "I jumped in my car, I didn't even think," Matos [the Texas man] said. "All I kept thinking was 'he's not getting away.'" Marcus Wayne Brock, identified by police, drove off with the vehicle while dragging Garza along the ground for four or five blocks as her seatbelt trapped her against the car. Matos followed for a time but was not able to stop the incident before Garza died. "I was mortified," Matos said. "When I picked up that piece of signage that was on top of her car, and I saw what he did to her, I was enraged." Brock eventually crashed into a carwash before fleeing on foot. Matos continued to pursue Brock until he found him in Ralston Liquors and kept him there until police arrived.…¹

There's no bat but a mysterious "piece of signage" that was somehow on the top of the woman's car. Was the piece of signage mistaken for a bat? Did the Texas man wield that piece of signage as a weapon when chasing the carjacker? This story raises more questions than it answers.

The bizarre headline was subsequently revised to:

Texas man chased down carjacker who allegedly dragged woman to her death³

The grammar was corrected and the bat has now disappeared from the headline. The story itself appears to be unchanged, including the grammatical error in the first sentence.

However, the bat makes a surprise reappearance in a video accompanying a different article on the same crime by a local television station. According to the video, the heroic Texas man, Matos, had a bat while holding the suspect prisoner in the liquor store⁴. Also, in the same video you can see what may be a sign of some sort leaning against the driver's side of the carjacked vehicle. So, apparently there really was a bat and not a piece of signage. Where the bat came from is not explained.

There's one final mystery I can't solve: does Fox News employ copyeditors?

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Notes:

1. Peter Aitken, "Texas man chased down carjacker who allegedly dragged women to her death with baseball bat", Fox News, 10/2/2021. This is the Internet Archive Wayback Machine's archived copy of the original page, which has since been revised as explained above.
2. Oddly enough, I can't take the blame for perpetrating this ugly neologism, as a websearch indicates that it's been committed a few times previously. However, I am to blame for perpetuating it. See: Perpetrate or Perpetuate, 7/2/2021. For an example of a previous occurrence of the word, see the following paper on explanation: Jonathan Waskan, "Intelligibility and the CAPE: Combatting Anti-psychologism About Explanation (Draft)", Academia, accessed: 10/3/2021.
3. Peter Aitken, "Texas man chased down carjacker who allegedly dragged woman to her death", Fox News, 10/2/2021. This is the current page with revised headline; accessed: 10/3/2021.
4. Stefania Okolie, "Witness to carjacking months ago helped to stop suspected killer on Uvalde", ABC 13, 10/1/2021. The article itself does not mention the bat.

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